Florida Education Reform – Student Performance and Wealth

——Today’s post is a quicker entry, since by the gods I am horrible at sticking to a schedule. The “doing anything is better than nothing at all” school of thought is being adapted out of necessity here. Anyway, two weeks ago the state congress of Florida, led by far right darling Rick Scott, passed a reform of the employment and compensation for teaching in the state. The bill is quite focused, only accomplishing two main changes. First, every teacher now serves on a one year contract, as a contingent worker – no more tenure, no more benefits via seniority, etc. The second change relates to teacher’s pay and rehiring. The bill requires that all teachers be given one of four ratings – Highly Effective, Effective, Needs Improvement, and Unsatisfactory – and these ratings must be at least 50% determined by student performances on standardized tests. If teachers place in the bottom two categories, they have a set amount of time to improve their “performance” or they are let go. You can read the bill here if you wish

——Now, the internet is replete with descriptions of how this is utterly unfair, of how it will drive talented teachers out of Florida, of how it holds teachers to impossible standards, and of how it ensures that the teaching profession is slowly reduced to near minimum wage labour. I just want to touch on how the dynamics of this bill will play out in Florida at large. There is a very important note to make – the bill does not peg teachers pay to changes in their students performance on tests, but on absolute performance. Teachers are paid more if students do well, not if students do better than students from last year’s class. While not necessarily the wrong choice, this decision will have very important consequences. Rick Scott and his cohorts, drawing from the deep well of experience they have from their zero years of teaching in Florida’s school system, believe that teachers are primarily responsible for student outcomes, and by making teachers compete with each other for their survival, they will teach their students better. A small segment of society known as people who study education outcomes, however, disagree with this assessment. The mainstream consensus is pretty clear that factors outside of the control of the school account for either a large amount or an outright majority of a students performance. Most important is the involvement of the family in caring about the child’s education, setting expectations for their children to do well in school, and providing appropriate nutrition, study spaces, aid for problem subjects, and so on. It is, of course, no surprise to anyone anywhere that one of the most significant indicators of student performance on standardized tests, therefore, is wealth. The survey I linked is one of many showing this correlation, but this study has the added benefit of showing that the correlation between wealth and test scores held true in 1966, 1972, and 2009. Its obvious if you think about it – a poor family where both parents must work twelve hours a day does not have the time or the energy to spend helping their children with school work, and people at the margins of society tend not to preach to their kids about how getting straight A’s is the only path to happiness. Regardless of the reason, wealth is a larger determinant of school performance than the school itself – let alone teachers. In fact, in Florida, it is an even worse problem than in other states – the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test is so biased towards skills favoured by wealthy households that the worst performing school out of every upper-class district still did better than the best school out of any lower-class district.

——So what does this mean for Florida teachers? Its pretty obvious to figure out at this point: the new school reform bill ensures that people who teach and poorer schools, in poorer neighborhoods, will be paid less, while people who teach in rich neighborhoods will be paid more. Beneath all the propaganda, this bill is simply another wealth re-distributor, one distributing from the poor to the rich. Teaching jobs normally are some of the higher paying jobs in poorer neighborhoods, kind of a form of wealth equalization by the government, in order to ensure that good teachers would teach at poorer schools. This bill reverses that. Furthermore, given that the pay for teaching in the US is barely enough to raise a family, even the most idealistic teachers must make decisions about their life based on marginal profit – as such, any good teacher will make the decision to leave poorer neighborhoods and head for richer suburban pastures. People complained that the bill would cause a brain drain of teachers from Florida – but the reality is it will be a drain from Florida’s low income areas, towards the high income ones. Undoubtedly, this will cause the performance of lower income schools to suffer even more – which I’m sure the Republicans will blame on unions and public management, and prompt attempts to get rid of them entirely. Works out for them – not so much for the students or teachers though.